Software builder, group fitness instructor

TL;DL – .NET Rocks! 1377 (The Marketing of .NET with Beth Massi)

Show Notes

Beth Massi has software development experience, but is now the product marketing manager for .NET. Traditional marketing does not work with developers: you need to build credibility and relationships. She is exploring more user story writing and working with bigger customers. The Microsoft engineers are becoming more community-oriented (i.e., spending time in the GitHub repositories).

It’s very easy to get North American-centric.

Yes, Microsoft is a northwest US company, but it has a worldwide prescence.

Much of the internal marketing (e.g., field, subsidiary) gets more international.

There are lots of other spaces to branch out — YouTube, Google Hangouts.

Microsoft wants to meet developers where they are.

Channel 9 is still a premier place to find Connect(); Conference videos, on-demand sessions, and live streams.

Product development is like landing a plane on a runway: Land smooth, and make sure none of the passengers die. In marketing, as long as the plane ends up on the runway, it’s a success. And big bangs are more exciting! Marketing makes people notice; it creates moments in time.

Marketing has a close relationship with the product teams; it’s building thought leadership and making sure that people see what’s happening.

The goal is to move toward .NET Standard — a standard set of APIs across the .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Xamarin.

The vision is that .NET Standard will help the ecosystem explode with library support.

.NET Core is getting into smaller devices.

.NET Core was built with two focuses: be able to (1) write extremely small, modular microservices (containerization), (2) run on small devices (not just mobile phones).

Tizen is an operating system that runs on Samsung devices, which supports .NET Standard.

At Connect(); // 2016, Microsoft announced Visual Studio for the Mac.

.NET is the most productive environment. It just happened to start on Windows. Other developers/companies chose something else because they didn’t want Windows. The goal is to “.NET all the things” — any application, any developer, any platform. This is especially true for mobile and cloud, which is not all about Windows.

Docker Tools for Visual Studio are now in preview; you can debug Docker containers from Windows. The whole point of the container is isolation; you’re sure to get exactly what you need only in the container that runs the service/app. There are Windows containers to isolate older ASP.NET apps.

Better Know a Framework

Listener E-mail

From show #1217 (.NET Foundation with Martin Woodward and Beth Massi); Microsoft XNA should be in the .NET Foundation. Microsoft announced that there is no XNA v5 coming, as MonoGame has picked this up. Beth mentioned that open-sourcing software later down the road is difficult (e.g., resource investment). Because Microsoft isn’t investing in XNA, they won’t spend resources open-sourcing it.